‘Is that what India is about?’

I must have been all of 10 or 12 when my parents first took me to Haridwar and Rishikesh. It was a peculiar trip for us and a bit out of the ordinary because as a family we weren't ritualistic or religious enough to want to wash our sins away in the Ganga.

We were not a family that took pilgrimages and Haridwar is hardly the kind of town that children feel drawn to. Be that as it may we found ourselves being driven along the congested, squalid streets of Haridwar, where bovine creatures and pilgrims jostled for space along with limbless beggars, assorted peddlers and mountain heaps of garbage. On yet another trip during the Kumbh, we found ourselves being saved from getting crushed in a stampede, the news of which made it to the front page of most dailies (the news of the stampede, not of us being saved, we weren't a famous family.)

Years later I wondered if this was really the mystic India? One that included mendicants sitting by the riverside, bodies smeared in ash, yogis standing in the freezing waters on one leg and praying, generously proportioned unclothed elderly women taking a plunge in the gushing waters and scary looking, dreadlock haired naga sadhus smoking chillum. I was as intrigued by what I saw in Haridwar as I was repulsed when I first went there as a kid for I hadn't seen a dirtier, worse smelling, city in my entire life and for the longest time in the years to follow I cringed at the memory of it.

It was only years later, when I read Autobiography of a Yogi, that Hardiwar-Rishikesh began to fascinate me. I longed to explore mystic India, the India of ascetics like Sugandhi baba and Lahiri Mahasya and one where the metaphysical transcended the material.

As much as I reckoned that our children were too young to understand Haridwar-Rishikesh, we decided to take them there with us a few years ago during their spring break because I wanted to jolt them out of their comfort zone, which was mostly malls, Hyde Park and Seine River cruises. What better way to achieve that than Haridwar? It helped that my parents accompanied us on this trip to help us tackle the ‘But whys' of our four-year-old.

After checking into La Case, a decent boutique hotel, we drove to Hari Ki Pauri and I was pleasantly surprised by how much better it now was from how I remembered it. It was relatively clean and policed, there seemed to be a system in place for people wanting to perform pujas by the river and Chinese restaurants offering ‘Air-conditioning Inside' stood alongside the ghats. Our older one did not seem too impressed and wanted to know why we had brought her to Haridwar. “To give you an idea of India,” I told her flatly with a promise that if I heard anybody crib I would ensure we spend every spring in ‘places like these'. “Really, people without legs and hands is what India is all about?” said the cheeky 9-year-old.

I left it to my father to explain the mythological significance of Hari Ki Pauri and the manthan story between the asuras and devas to get the girls more interested. It worked temporarily and so it is that we found ourselves walking the ghats by the Ganga at Hari Ki Pauri. People perform various ceremonies by the water, a father watching his young son's head being shaved, a woman lighting a diya cradled in a basket of flowers and releasing it in the high current of the holy river, a family of eight, bathing in the icy water, purging their sins away and a bunch of elderly widowed women in white singing hymns as they dipped themselves in the freezing water kept the girls enrapt for over an hour.

None of us were too keen to take a dip in the water but we did our bit to cleanse our karma by dangling our legs in it while holding on tight to the chain along the ghats to save us from being propelled into the water by the current.

Later, we fed the children a hearty Indian meal comprising tall glasses of lassi with cream, chow mien—the staple dish of UP—and chole-bhature at Chotiwala, one of the oldest restaurants in the city, before retiring for the afternoon at the hotel.

Brining these millennial urban kids to Haridwar is not very different from bringing a European or an American to this holy city for they are as unfamiliar with this India as any foreigner and as confounded by it.

By the time we returned to the ghats for the aarti, it was dusk and the river and the ghats took on a different hue. People were occupying the ghats thick and fast and in large numbers. Priests perched on raised wooden planks offered to perform pujas for all and sundry and the air reverberated with the sound of bells, chants and hymns. Our children, who had last been a part of a similar arrangement for the Disney Parade in Paris, stood there looking stupefied while we as parents did our best to not lose them in this sea of people. The scent of incense and flowers wafting through the air as we inched closer to the river, wiggling our way through the swarm and the aarti that followed (7pm) was a mesmerising if somewhat surreal affair. Thousands of diyas were let into the holy river and to the sound of bells against the backdrop of neon-lit hoardings of Nokia.

On our way back to the hotel, I lamented that I didn't carry our camera along and would have to plan a trip to Haridwar again for better pictures of the aarti than what I managed from my iPhone. My younger one, who was clearly unmoved by the sights of the day, asked to be excluded from a repeat excursion.

The older one piped in too to tragically announce as this was the singularly most boring day of her life. This I think was a marvelous thing to happen for there is very little boredom the present times allow our over-stimulated kids. And boredom, in my opinion, is as crucial to a child's mental and emotional well-being as protein is to her body.

The next day we drove our two self-pitying kids o Rishikesh, which in spite of its proximity to Haridwar, is vastly different. For one it is on the foothills of the Himalayas and the starting point to more exalted pilgrimages like Badrinath and Kedarnath and therefore prettier. For another, Rishikesh has cleaner air, is less religious more spiritual, a little hippie and overall more child-friendly. We walked the length of the famous Laxman Jhula, a suspension bridge that shakes and trembles slowly much to our children's merriment and walked in and out of some well-known temples around it.

As we walked along a winding alley to explore the city further we could not help but notice hordes of Westeners in search for higher meaning. The other aspect of this city that I found unavoidable was the face-readers, who accosted us over and over again, each time uttering something uncannily accurate. If it weren't for my parents and husband who hold a disparaging outlook towards fortune tellers, I would have taken a private appointment with some of them right away.

We barely just spent a few hours in Rishikesh, which was a mistake, because there is a lot of exploring that one can do there. Drive a little further up from there and adventure seekers can camp on excellent beachside campsites and indulge in white water rafting offered for all levels. We went back to Rishikesh, a year later, but this time without the kids.

Now what a perfect little holiday that was!